speed is distance divided by time
by MessengerOfDreams
Summary: Three hundred miles an hour never seemed as fast as twenty miles an hour did
**When you find an incredible song and it makes you write almost against your will**

 **Disclaimer: I own nothing, regret nothing, and let them forget nothing**

I didn't memorize the date on that newspaper. An article's impersonal, just like finding out something like that in six ignorant lines on thin paper that try and turn an entire life into a soundbyte. That's the most they'll ever know of her, and here I am on the first page of a novel trying to figure out how all of this makes me feel. Just the feeling of it all. I remember some jackoff telling me tough guys didn't feel like that, but racing fast and fighting hard doesn't make a sad song any less painful when you can identify with it, and it doesn't make you feel any weaker when you can't help but wonder why you couldn't have learned this shit before it was too late, after it was absolutely valuable, after you shut the radio off in your car and took out the sound speaker.

I know they noticed something was different when I came back for round four. I remember when this place had twelve people and too much room instead of sixty people and not nearly enough. Maybe it's just having five times the set of eyes read me, it's not like we're all jammed into a broken-window condo on shit row. It's a mansion. There's room for some crazy-ass people here. But I've been poisoned on people, I guess because too many have let me down, let me go, broken my trust, and against all logic and empathy I still assign these to you. Human nature's cruel beyond belief, I guess.

No one quite gets it because I guess no one was reading the local news that day. Not that it'd give them anything worthwhile. Those who figured out the concept of what it was don't get the abstract. They try and tell me she was just another girl, there's a lot of fish in the sea, that I shouldn't let it hurt me as much as it does. Just another girl, because it seems to easy to marginalize something so important when you're on the outside looking in.

I want to tell them the stories she told me. I want to tell them about the way it felt to kill people you've never met, people you could see in a mirror. I've never been there, but I know how it feels because I've felt the guilt for her because I hoped it'd make her smile. I'd tell them about the way she'd jog through the forest with me, how every footstep hit the ground like she was still jumping out of a copter. I'd make them feel what it was like to see someone smile when they'd spent too long crying.

I'd take them driving on a track a three hundred miles an hour and then let them compare it to twenty miles an hour on a secluded highway under a night of stars next to someone they loved and see which one makes their heart race faster. I'd show them how silence can speak more than all of the traumatized stories could ever cover. I'd show them how four years with a stranger like me is nothing compared to a month with someone like her. I'd show them how to dance, how to actually dance, in a way that even when she talks about missing prom nights and high school reunions makes it feel like you're the one who's dancing for the first time. I'd give them a friendship that felt closer to love than romance ever could, and see if they also feel like it wasn't ever quite enough.

Maybe after all of this takes them over, throws them around like blades of a chopper and rearranges them into a new person, I'll show them that newspaper clipping again and see if they end up just like me knowing these thrills they've experienced aren't coming back. I'll see if they hide from anything capable of cutting that deeply. I'll see if these wannabe playboys, these manufactured personalities, these schemers and these characters and these warriors, if it falls away while they hide from the world trying to turn back time and relearn everything they thought they knew. I'll see if they can go through life without being reminded of her in every small detail- boots, sun hats, convertibles, dog tags, an empty pistol, newspapers.

Then maybe I'll ask them if they'll move on.

Then maybe I'll ask them if she's still just another girl.

Instead, all I have are awkward responses and too much silence because no one's here to talk to me in a way that matters anymore. No one else feels worthy of that chance. Everything's so surface level, and suddenly the victory I was chasing in that three-hundred-mile-an-hour passion doesn't feel worth it when it only took twenty miles an hour to bring me to life. However fast I'm going, knowing it'll never be faster than a bullet makes it hard to chase after what I used to have.

They say time heals all wounds, but it's been six months of this shit and I'm losing my goddamn mind. I don't know how much longer I can wait knowing how easy it would be to find her again. I guess I should understand her better knowing that, but I just wish I'd asked her what she was trying to find. I was too lost in where we were I didn't look to see where we were going. Now all I'm going is nowhere fast.

Speed of zero miles an hour. Now it's not about where I'm going, it's just trying not to get wrecked by life passing me by.


End file.
